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By Enedelia J. Obregón | Senior Correspondent
Hundreds of schoolchildren with no food at home don’t look forward to weekends.
To improve their situations, Monica von Waaden and Zee Narimar started HopeAustin, a nonprofit that provides weekend meals to students who receive subsidized meals at school but are food insecure at home. The program now serves 240 children in 20 schools in the Round Rock Independent School District (RRISD) and 100 children in three schools in the Leander Independent School District (LISD).
“There is a growing need, even in schools in neighborhoods considered wealthy,” von Waaden said.
RRISD provides free food services for 266 homeless students and 38 foster students. Several weekend food programs serve 1,240 students weekly. The district has 2,755 students receiving free or reduced lunches, not including educational-employment and pre-kindergarten programs, since those students eat for free under Texas Education Agency guidelines. LISD has more than 9,000 students enrolled in free or reduced lunch programs.
HopeAustin is entering its third year. The founders –– whose children are out of school –– met when Narimar’s youngest and von Waaden’s oldest were in elementary school. They built years of experience organizing volunteers in PTA programs school such as the RRISD PTA Clothes Closet. Von Waaden, a parishioner at St. Thomas More Parish in Austin, also volunteers with Mobile Loaves and Fishes, a nonprofit that feeds the homeless.
A few years ago, von Waaden and two other women formed Chicktime Austin under the umbrella of a national volunteer organization called Chicktime. When the two other women left Chicktime Austin, she and Narimar formed HopeAustin.
“I grew up in a family that did philanthropy,” said von Waaden, who grew up in El Paso. “That’s just what we did. Three times a month we’d go across the border and take food to people.”
While overseeing the Clothes Closet, von Waaden saw a need for food among many of those families. The need is not just in neighborhoods considered to be poor, she said.
“Hungry children are everywhere,” von Waaden said.
Narimar grew up in India with a single mother. Extreme poverty and hunger were everywhere.
“She always provided meals for us,” Narimar said. “But it was difficult.”
She said it breaks her heart that there are still children going hungry in a country as wealthy as the U.S.
“Food is such a basic need,” Narimar said.
Since both women had spent years helping children and were especially concerned about hunger, they decided to focus on childhood hunger with their new nonprofit.
Putting their organizational skills to work, they began with a small storage unit that Chicktime had used. They began with 100 meals. Soon it was 400. Then 800. As they hit 1,000, they realized they needed larger storage space and moved to their present location.
Now, they rent an air-conditioned storage unit that can hold almost 3,000 prepared bags. In the unit they store the pre-packaged food they purchase and then gather three times in the fall semester and about four times in the spring semester to put together meal kits in plastic bags with the help of volunteers. Each bag contains nine items the children can prepare for consumption at home on weekends.
On a recent Sunday morning, dozens of volunteers from the Westwood High School baseball team, Young Men’s Service League from Round Rock and the National Charity League gathered to package 2,600 meals. In warm weather they meet in the morning; in cold weather they meet in the afternoon.
Volunteers lugged large cartons of items such as macaroni and cheese, tuna fish, applesauce and canned chips from the warehouse to outdoor tables for other groups to put in individual bags.
Another group –– mostly moms –– pressed as much air as possible out of the bags before tying them in a knot and placing them in large bins. The bags need to be small enough to fit in a child’s backpack.
Another group placed them where the cartons of food had previously been stored. On the day of delivery to schools, another small group will take the bags to the schools and leave them in the front office.
“Only the principal and counselor know who the children are,” von Waaden said. “It’s to protect their privacy.”
The two women and a handful of volunteers do the bulk of the shopping. St. Thomas More Parish recently held a food drive to stock the warehouse, and von Waaden said other parishes are welcome to do the same.
Narimar said the two are grateful to the many volunteers who help.
“We can’t do this by ourselves,” she said. “We need the help of the community and of businesses to end childhood hunger in the community we live in. If each one of us does something, it makes a huge difference.
Even though she is not Catholic, Narimar remembers well the words of St. Teresa of Calcutta, “If you can’t feed a hundred people, then feed just one.”
For more information about HopeAustin, visit www.Hope4Austin.org or visit them on Facebook at www.facebook.com/Hope4Austin. To volunteer or hold a food drive, contact board@hope4austin.org or (512) 648-3613.